


Blackout.

by aphn_un



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Biar Knows Stuff, Biar and Galo have a weird kind of buddy kind of not?? relationship, Galo has a crush on Kray but he keeps it on the downlow most of the time, Galo knows exactly what he's seeing but would he ever turn in his hero? No, I suck at building tension but god I tried, Incredibly mild horror, Internal Conflict, Kray desperately wants to blow up but, Other, POV First Person, Pre-Canon, Tension, an incredibly sleep deprived Kray wrestles with his Burnish powers and Galo is there to see it, he's suffering from that Villain Condition, that one, very slight elements of body horror, you know the one where the Villain can't kill the protagonist until the end of the film?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:07:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24341053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphn_un/pseuds/aphn_un
Summary: It was just nice to see the Governor laughing.
Relationships: Kray Foresight/Galo Thymos
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	Blackout.

Autumn was definitely on its way, which I appreciated.

Summer was a great season, but this year I’d found myself growing weirdly tired of the sticky heat and the bugs flying here there and everywhere. So lately I had been taking advantage of the cooler evenings and the shorter days to go on a few quick walks every now and again. I figured that it was good for me, and if I stuck to walking about the City Centre, I could easily run into work if Mad Burnish decided to act up. 

They hadn’t for a while, but being ready at all times paid off. In my line of work, the cost of being caught unprepared was a hefty one.

This evening I’d waited until the sun was just threatening to dip below the horizon before setting off. I jammed my ear buds in and wove a path through the last few people on the street, heading down to the City Centre. Somebody might’ve shouted a greeting at me once or twice, but with my music playing, all I could really do was wave enthusiastically in the direction I thought the noise had come from. 

They’d got the message, surely, hopefully.

Eventually my usual route led me further into the City, and soon enough my eyes focused in on the Foresight Foundation tower. If I was honest, it was a little hard not to, it dominated the City’s skies, and tonight it looked immense in the dark; all white cladding and glaring lights, looming above me like its founder so often did, intentional or otherwise.

I found myself suddenly smiling. Good old Gov, was he still there? Maybe he’d appreciate a drop in. 

When I reached the front doors, there were a few people slowly filing out, chatting amongst themselves in low voices. All of them were complete strangers to me except for one, and the smile I’d had on earlier came back with a vengeance at the sight of her. 

“Hiya, Ms Colossus! Long day?”

On the stairs, the Governor’s personal secretary, Biar Colossus, paused. She had one hand buried in her bag and the other forcing its way into a narrow jacket sleeve. It might have been the fact that I’d caught her a little off guard, but she seemed a little less composed than usual, jittery almost, with a constant quiver in the way she moved.

“Longer than I would’ve liked, dear, but that’s work for you.” She replied, painted lips stretching out into a smile of her own, but even there the shiver seemed to be present. I knew that at some point I’d meant to ask her if she was alright and yet somehow all I could think to do was…

“Hey, is the Governor still in?” I asked brightly. “He usually comes out with you.”

Biar flicked a hand up to the upper floors of the building behind us.

“He’s still up there, though hopefully he won’t be for much longer. There aren’t many lights in that office of his at the moment, there's some fault with the wiring that’s taking a while to sort out. Or so I’ve been told.”

“Right, right… You reckon he could do with a quick visit?” I flashed her a grin. “I got my key card on me, I’m allowed in after hours, right? Riiiiight?”

She quirked an eyebrow.

“I suppose so. It’s not like you’re some stranger wandering in off of the street,” she sighed, “go and call on him if you must, but don’t stay for too long, Governor Foresight is a busy man.”

“I get that, but even a busy man’s gotta sleep, right?” I moved past her, jogging my way up the small flight of steps to the front doors. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna try and peek at any top secret government stuff. I’ll see you around, yeah?”

She didn’t reply, I swiped my key card across the little black scanner and glanced back to see if she’d heard me, only to find that she and the rest of the staff had gone. Weird… Was she normally like that? 

Weirder still was seeing the reception area of the huge building so deserted. Unbeknownst to Biar, it wasn’t like I hadn’t been in after hours before, but there were usually a few people here. A janitor walking around, a couple of nervous looking interns crammed into the waiting area, hell even the woman behind the reception desk wasn’t there. 

Something jerked restlessly inside of my stomach, but I shrugged it off and moved across the space to the elevators opposite. 

This was dumb, I’d been here tons of times, there was no reason for the place to suddenly start giving me the creeps. I jammed a finger into the lift’s call button and waited for the metal doors to slide open.

\- 

Gov had settled for an office on one of the top floors, of course, typical. With him it was go big or go home, and the journey up in the elevator felt like a damn eternity, especially with my stomach behaving the way it was.  
I couldn’t figure it out… Maybe it was the quiet that was rubbing me the wrong way? The building was always filled with some type of noise, footsteps, voices or an intercom blaring every now and then. I could’ve sworn that there was always a radio or something playing too, but even that seemed to have hit the road.

Was it really that late? I checked my watch. Quarter to nine, definitely not late enough for a place as big and important as this to be completely empty. 

I tapped my foot against the textured flooring of the elevator and leant against one of its cold, metal walls. The slight vibration from its movement felt nice against my back, smooth and uninterrupted until a sudden bump in its journey had me sucking in a sharp breath through my teeth. 

Fuck.

The quiet, it was definitely the quiet, and the dark. I hadn’t experienced complete and total darkness in Promepolis for quite some time thanks to the glare of the City’s lights, but somehow in that little metal box, the outside world felt a lot darker to me than it had in a long, long while. I sniffed, and watched the little light opposite me slowly flick through the floor numbers, one by one until a deep groan of metal on metal sounded, followed by a tinny ‘ding!’

Finally. 

The doors slid open with a clunk and I stepped out hastily, my jaw set. There was no getting away from how I felt now, there was _something_ churning away inside my gut, something raw, something primal and it was made so much worse by how damn confusing this all was! Why did I suddenly feel so out of my comfort zone? I knew this part of the building like the back of my hand, and yet…

The corridor leading up to the Governor’s office was dark, it would’ve been pitch black had it not been for the city lights shining in through the floor to ceiling windows that made up one wall. With a groan, I remembered Biar mentioning something about the lights not working, but I didn’t think she’d meant the whole damn floor.  
I hurried my way down the corridor, as if I could run away from the quiet and the unease filling the air. This floor had the same, weird, deserted feeling as the reception area, except this time there were no damn lights either. God this was so stupid, how had such a tiny, niggling feeling turned into this? What the hell was wrong with me?

It was fine, it was _fine_ … I could see a pair of glass doors ahead, and more importantly I could see a warm, yellow light filtering through them, it looked like a desk lamp of some kind. I was close enough to see inside the office now, with the fancy tiled floor and the symmetrical pools of water surrounding it. The familiarity calmed me slightly, as did the thought of finally getting to catch up with…

Where even _was_ the Governor?

I paused just outside of the office doors, squinting in through the glass. His desk was empty, the little lamp he’d set up there was enough to tell me that, and he wasn’t at one of the windows, looking out across the City like he so often did. He wasn’t a small man; it would’ve been pretty hard for me to just glance over him, so where the hell was he?  
I fought back another groan… I hadn’t missed him, had I? Biar had said that he wouldn’t be hanging around here for much longer, he could’ve easily taken the other elevator, we could’ve gone right past each other!

Sighing in exasperation at the thought that I’d come up in the creepy fucking elevator for no reason, I moved closer to the doors until the toe of my shoe scuffed the glass. I leant forward to press my forehead against it, framing my hands either side of my head so I could cancel out the soft glow of the City lights behind me. Maybe I could…

I heard a click. 

Something _huge_ suddenly moved to my left, a colossal figure swung about to face me, and a white, gloved hand snapped up to latch around one of the metal door handles in a grip so intense that the glass _rattled._

**”Oh fucking Hell!”**

It was as if the tension inside of me had reached its climax. I scrambled backwards, flattening myself against a wall in order to stop myself from falling on my ass. I could feel my heart racing and the blood roaring against my eardrums, building and building in volume until a soft voice called out to me, breaking through the ruckus. 

“Galo?”

Governor Kray Foresight stared out at me through the glass, blocking out the majority of the light available to us with his enormous frame, throwing the whole corridor back into that unsettling gloom.

“Gov Kray! God damn…” I exclaimed, pushing myself off of the wall and moving back up to the doors, forcing my mouth to form a shaky grin. “You scared the Hell outta me! I thought you’d gone home! Are you still working? S’awfully late to still be… Up here…”

I trailed off pathetically, I just couldn’t keep up my usual tone of voice. Kray, like everything else in the building tonight, seemed… off. I wished with everything I had that I just could pinpoint what exactly _off_ was, if I could make sense of that, then I knew I wouldn’t be feeling quite as…

Quite as what? What was it? Scared? Why was I scared?

I knew the Governor, I knew him well enough to know things that I was _sure_ no one else did, or at least I liked to think that. I knew his favourite dessert, I knew the name of the town where he’d been born, I knew that the lock of hair he always had out of place was done on purpose, but the man now looking out at me through the glass was someone I couldn’t read, someone I couldn’t make sense of. 

Kray hadn’t responded, in fact he hadn’t even moved, he just continued to peer out at me, head held up and tilted slightly to the side. There were two, tiny pinpricks of light reflected in both of his eyes, where was that coming from? The corridor?

“It’s late, Galo.” He said suddenly, his shoulders sagging with a sigh. 

That weird light stayed where it was. His tone was low, hushed and he was letting his accent slip, it was something he always did around me, but tonight it was more pronounced than usual, perhaps it was down to how tired he felt? He was certainly moving wearily, every stir, every little shift he made appeared to be calculated and slow, careful, like he was afraid of disturbing something, as if a sharper movement would set off an alarm, a bomb. 

Why _that_ thought had occurred to me, I had no idea. But…

“Who let you in?” He asked, leaning forward, his other palm now rested above his head against the glass, the doorframe creaked. Was he using it to support himself?

I cleared my throat loudly and took a few steps forward, hoping that that and the sound of my footsteps would be enough to break through the tension slowly choking the air, everything around me felt heavier and darker than before, like I was moving through soup.

“I let myself in, key card,” I replied, holding it up for him to see, “you gave it to me, remember? Like a week ago? Thought you might need a bit of company up here. You think you ought to call it a day? We could go and grab a coffee or something, no offence, Gov, but you kinda look like you need one.”

“Ha… Aha, how observant of you.” He laughed, cracking a smile.

I gnawed on my lip, a little harder than I’d intended to. What little relief hearing him laugh had given me was instantly crushed by that smile. Fuck… Too wide, too many teeth, or at least it looked that way to me, it was the angle I was standing at, surely. I was closer to him now, and though I tried not to look too closely, my brain still struggled with what I was seeing. 

There wasn’t enough light behind me to… Make _this_ happen, it would’ve made sense if there were a strip light above my head, but there was a glow coming from somewhere, something that illuminated parts of my hero’s face in a way I didn’t like. 

“You didn’t… Answer my question, Gov.” I muttered, though a part of me was now fervently wishing he would say no, despite how eager I’d been to see him before. Now all I could think of was how small I suddenly felt, Kray hadn’t moved, and yet the darkness was almost complete, as if he had suddenly grown large enough to totally block out the already pitiful light behind him. He’d always been big, but this was… Was this normal?

I prompted him again. 

“Y-You know, the question about the… Coffee th…”

“I’ll pack up here soon.” Kray interrupted me, bringing a hand up to rub at his eyes, something he hardly ever did, it showed how tired he was and showing any kind of a break in his composure was something he tried to avoid. “Then I think it would be wise of me to call it a night. Don’t you?”

“I-I guess, yeah, seriously, you look beat… Do you need any help packi…”

I stopped myself this time, Kray was peering out at me through a gap in his fingers, one eye fixed squarely on my face, the sclera standing out more than it should have done in the near darkness we stood in. A thrill of something I now _knew_ was fear passed through me, that little dash of light was still there, quivering, _flickering._

I knew what it was, I’d seen it before, the way it jittered and jerked and warped its form into what were _almost_ shapes. It was there, but it couldn’t be there, every single ounce of knowledge I had, every single bit of my training was screaming at me to act, but I was frozen in place. No. **No.** It’s your eyes, Thymos… It’s your eyes… You’re jumpy, it’s dark, you’ve had a long day, you’re _seeing things!_

Kray sucked in a breath, low and shuddering, like a rattle, or a…

“Go home, Galo. Please.” 

The haze suddenly lifted, and an urgency to leave hit me so hard it almost left me winded.

“R-Right, right. I’ll leave you be! Um…” I moved back, only to have my knee tremble and give way beneath me. Swearing lightly, I managed to catch myself again, my eyes were averted and I didn’t look back again. “That coffee offer is still up, though! Y-Yell at me, yeah?”

“I will see how busy my schedule is. Goodnight, Galo.”

I went as fast as I could without actually running, I had a short, mental debate with myself whether or not to look back, but before I could come to a proper conclusion, my eyes had darted over my shoulder anyway. Kray’s shadowy figure was moving away from the door, back to where he’d been when I had first arrived. I couldn’t see for sure, but _something_ glinted at me before his head disappeared too, I heard a few thuds of heavy footsteps.

“Fuck, come on… Come on…” I grumbled, slamming my fist against the lift’s call button, prising the doors apart the second they began to open. It was only when the whirr of the lift started up, that I realised I’d been holding my breath and with a heavy gasp I leant against the rail opposite, eyes open and glassy.

“What the fuck…” I heard myself murmur, it was all I could think to say, everything else in my mind was too noisy, too scrambled up for me to properly decipher, I wasn’t even sure if I _wanted_ to decipher it.

“The fuck was… What the fuck… Oh God what the _Hell…”_

-

“I’m glad I took you up on the coffee. Homemade is always much better than store bought. Don’t you agree?”

I felt the corner of my lips turn up into a grin, filling up my own cup before taking my seat at the tiny table.

“Depends on where you go,” I said cheerily, “I mean shoot, Gov, you could probably afford the best coffee out there, I just make do with convenience store stuff.”

“Do you, now?” Kray arched an eyebrow, angling his eyes down to his cup, as if it would tell him the brand if he stared hard enough at it. “It must be something you do to it, then. Maybe I should have you set up in the foyer instead of the coffee machine, God knows the thing is on its last legs.”

He laughed at that, reminding me of a comment someone had once made about the man’s habit of laughing at his own jokes, in a magazine article or something, but it didn’t really matter to me. It was just nice to see him in the daylight after what had happened the other night… _Whatever_ that had been, nobody else seemed to know either. Aina had blamed it on biorhythms, Remi had laughed at me, and Biar had fixed me with a look that made my stomach lurch if I dwelled on it for too long.

So I didn’t. It was just nice to see the Governor laughing.

**Author's Note:**

> I went on a bit of a twitter ramble this morning about how Kray's Promare might end up showing itself in different ways out of desperation, after being denied the chance to burn for so long. After all, this is an alien entity synced with a human body, an immensely powerful alien entity at that. 
> 
> I don't think it would be too ridiculous to imagine that it might end up seeping through somehow, if it can't burn, it can show itself in other ways, especially when we consider the mess Kray made of himself at the end. The man literally blew up.
> 
> With all that said and done, I hope anybody who reads this little one shot enjoyed it! I'm still getting to grips with writing the characters, so I hope I did an okay job! Let me know what you think in the comments if you'd like! Thanks so much for reading!


End file.
